Adventures in home working

Kathy has yet another amazing post on her Creating Passionate Users site about the fact that animals love exercise, and she questions why we don’t.  Well whilst I think its a great article with wonderful pictures of her horses if she came around to my house and saw my four girls bouncing on the trampoline she would see a lot of parallels with her horses.  Some of us love exercise too, and its not just the kids round here who love the trampoline, the beach, the sand dunes, the tennis courts, the swimming pool and their bikes!

I have just posted some advice on how to implement a wiki in the enterprise, and here is another great link to a comprehensive approach to implementing social software. 

Peter Cochrane certainly does a lot more travelling than me,  but you can be sure I will be following some of his tips next time I fly internationally.  This is an excellent article and demonstrates – yet again – the value of experts sharing the way they work – or in this case travel!

John Flinn shares his ideas as well in this article

I am excited about the new Records Management functionality in SharePoint 2007,  it should allow a neat separation between the loosely managed collaborative spaces that SharePoint already does fairly well and the need for tightly controlled management of business records.  In that context I was pleased to see a new blog startup that is explaining the rationale and hopefully soon the product details behind this new functionality.   In this post they explain why the two types of space are needed, and it’s definitely worth subscribing to check out the story as it unfolds – product blogging at its best!

Your organization’s information infrastructure consists of 2 different types of spaces – “collaborative spaces” where knowledge workers do their work (including creating information, some of which may become records), and “records spaces” where records managers administer the business records that must be retained beyond the period of time when they’re useful to the knowledge workers who created them.

Check out this article for more details.

I already new that Office SharePoint 2007 was going to support mobile browser access,  but this article by Martin Kearn provides a good description and some images that show you what to expect (functional but ugly)

Anyway the post has an extra treat, it introduced me to the fact that you can download a networked emulator for the Pocket PC that you can use to actually try this integration with SharePoint out even if you don’t have a Pocket PC, and even if you do it should be great for demos over a web conference.  Here are the details from Martin’s site:

The easiest way to investigate this further is to get the Microsoft Windows Mobile emulator from http://msdn.microsoft.com/mobility/windowsmobile/downloads/emulatorpreview/default.aspx. Follow the instructions on the page for getting onto Betaplace and downloading the emulator.

Once you have the installation file, I suggest that you install it directly onto your SharePoint server. This way it is much easier to configure the networking between the server and the emulator.

The emulator will allow you to emulate a smart phone or PDA. I found that the PDA is easiest to work with. Follow these instructions to get a mobile view of SharePoint on your PDA emulator (you should be able to adapt them for SmartPhone if you are familiar with the SmartPhone interface)

-          Install the emulator and start the ‘Emulate Pocket PC-WM 2003 SE(Cold Boot)’ from your start menu

-          Map your real network card to the device by going to File > Configure > Network Tab > Enable ‘NE2000 PCMCIA adapter and bind to’ and click ‘OK’

Note: All of the following instructions are for the device interface itself, not the emulator application, unless otherwise stated.

Some of my friends have implemented Wikis in the enterprise with great success,  but right now they are not blogging about it so I need to fall back on this excellent advice provided by Rod Boothby on innovation Creators which is a truly excellent web site on enterprise applications of web office technologies.  Here is a snipit that demonstrates a few of the really great business scenarios that wikis can support, especially when integrated with RSS:

The CEO wanted the whole company to be aware of what their competitors where doing on a real time basis. Thierry and the CEO also wanted the whole team to be aware of all the latest changes in rules and regulations affecting the markets for the drugs they produce. In addition, the whole team needed to be kept up to date on the latest relevant medical research. Thierry and the CEO realized that they needed to tap the whole company as a source for this information. The information came from conferences, reports, personal contacts, and other unexpected sources. Clearly, it made sense to tap the whole team as an information gathering resource.

I couldn’t resist entering this contest on Lifehacker!

Snap a few pics of your favorite workspace – home office, desk, studio – and send ‘em in to us. Over the next week or so we’ll feature our favorites. Readers will vote on the ultimate coolest workspace – and the winner gets a $100 gift certificate to Amazon!

This is the main image I sent in,  with a few more detailed ones as well:

Lots of businesses are banning camera phones,  it’s really short sighted,  the business impact of a camera phone, well integrated into a person’s personal information management workflow will be huge.  Microsoft get this and are integrating camera phones into OneNote 2007, complete with OCR capability and Lifehacker recently provided a list of sample uses which is worth checking out.  In my case this is how I use my camera phone to take photo’s of:

• books I want to read while browsing around bookshops and then I order them from the library when I get home, or add them to my Amazon wishlist
• whiteboards after or during meetings
• magazine articles or book pages or device serial numbers etc etc,  that I want to remember or send to people
• the opening times of all the places I regularly visit
• menu’s
• things in shops I might want to buy, so I can check out their prices on the web when I get home
• where I park my car
• hotels I am staying in
• business cards
• people who I want to remember
• notes that I have written down (and then throw away)

I personally think that using the phones camera as a digital note taker combined with OneNote 2007 will be the killer application for both products.

Readers of my blog know only too well that I love screen real-estate having 3 19” screens and I certainly would never go back,  what amazes me is the fact that the productivity benefits are truly amazing and yet are largely un-tapped by most businesses.  According to Microsoft Research you can expect between 9 and 50% improvements in productivity, which equates to an ROI of significantly less than 1 month for most people.  In my case these are the main benefits I see:

• I am more relaxed
• I am bout 30% more productive for about 2 hours per day and 10% productive for another 3 hours (I work a short day)
• I hardly ever print anything, in fact I have purchased a Tablet PC (TC1100) in 18 months just from the savings in ink cartridges, let alone the savings in time, space, paper and increased security associated with not using paper.
• My desk is paperless, meaning its much easier to focus, tidier and more productive
• I can manage interruptions much better,  instant message conversations can be placed in my right monitor while I work uninterrupted on my other two.  when I am sharing my screen in a web conference or watching someone else share theirs I can still have a screen for IM conversations and another for reference material or note taking.

Take a look at this PDF it describes a really simple integration bus – rssbus – that is based on the RSS protocol.  It allows you to RSS enable applications and databases and use RSS to subscribe to events that these applications then publish.  There are a set of reusable modules that provide useful services as well.  The white paper is refreshing because it clearly positions the bus as a simple solution for businesses that want to get things done rather than agonise over architectural elegance, strategy, standards compliance etc, here are a few of my favourite quotes:

With RSSBus, our goal is to offer a simple, easy alternative for the small organization with
little to no IT assets, little to no professional development tools, and no professional
programmers to use them.
If you spend much of your working day developing web services for one of the major
service platforms, and you can no longer write a single sentence without a four, five, or
six letter acronym in it, perhaps you should stop reading right here and spare yourself the
disappointment.

And if your job title has “Architect” or “Enterprise” in it, then please  stop reading here. 
Just in case you didn’t notice, we said Service Bus, and not Enterprise Service Bus.  In
fact, this is the last time we will mention Enterprise.

What we are building is something different, a service platform for the rest of us, the non-
acronym-speaking crowd.  If you have bits of pieces of data that you would like to quickly
exchange with and/or connect to other systems, if simplicity and ease of use is your most
important consideration, please read on.

Check out the list of pre-built modules and you will get a feel for the sort of application events that the developers expect RSS bus to act upon:

Here is an alphabetical list of some of the modules included in the product:
AmazonOps: operations that provide access to Amazon services.
BusOps: core Bus operations (feeds, caching, meta information).
CcOps: operations for credit card authorization and processing.
EbayOps: operations that provide access to EBay services.
FedexOps: operations for FedEx shipping and tracking.
FeedOps: operations for managing RSS feeds.
FileOps: operations for managing files and directories.
FtpOps: operations for transferring files to and from FTP servers.
GoogleOps: operations that provide access to Google services.
ImapOps: operations for receiving email messages from IMAP servers.
LdapOps: operations for connecting to LDAP directories
MediaOps: operations that provide information about digital media files.
OfxOps: operations for accessing bank accounts and financial services.
PaypalOps: operations that provide access to PayPal payment services.
PopOps: operations for receiving email messages from POP servers.
QbOps: operations that provide access to Intuit’s QuickBooks.
SearchOps: operations for searching and indexing.
SmsOps: operations for sending SMS text messages.
SmtpOps: operations for sending SMTP email.
SqlOps: operations for connecting to SQL databases.
LdapOps: operations for connecting to LDAP directories.
MediaOps: operations that provide information about digital media files.
OfxOps: operations for accessing bank accounts and financial services.
PaypalOps: operations that provide access to PayPal payment services.
PopOps: operations for receiving email messages from POP servers.
QbOps: operations that provide access to Intuit’s QuickBooks.
SearchOps: operations for searching and indexing.
SmsOps: operations for sending SMS text messages.
SmtpOps: operations for sending SMTP email.
SqlOps: operations for connecting to SQL databases. 

It’s not difficult to see that this solution is going to appeal to people who have grown up with the web, who love REST and Mashups etc, and it’s simplicity could well serve as an inspiration to many big EAI solution providers as well.